The Blue Lagoon (1980)
Despite being a much derided actress, I’ve somehow grown fond of Brooke Shields. I quite like her early work. She started in the excellent Catholic horror pic Alice, Sweet Alice before finding herself in the middle of a firestorm by playing a child hooker in Louis Malle’s rather dull, slice of life period piece, Pretty Baby. Frankly, Brooke’s boyish bare botty can’t hold a candle next to Susan Sarandon’s stupendous swingers, the sight of which usually makes me lie face down on the floor in a state of reverence.
Brooke shrugged off Pretty Baby’s intense controversy, though, and soon signed up to play the pubescent sex partner of the permed, cock-baring muppet Christopher Atkins in The Blue Lagoon. This hugely successful flick ignited an additional firestorm before Brooke, true to type, played another underage fuck kitten in the nicely shot, rather amusing money-spinner, Endless Love. Clearly, Brooke doesn’t do mopey, heavy-duty stuff. She’s not a ‘proper’, award-winning actress like the ever-dull Meryl Streep and thus helps provide the perfect antidote to the tedium of 1900.
Blue Lagoon tells the story of two kids (and their grizzled cook) getting shipwrecked on a tropical island. It’s lovely to look at, with plentiful shots of nature in all its glory, and does capture a fair degree of idyllic seclusion, especially in its underwater shots of the pair swimming. Their transition from kids to teens is also nicely handled, a change that stirs up all sorts of naughty thoughts.
“I’ve seen you playing with it and I’ll tell your father, if he ever gets here…” Brooke warns the permed muppet after catching him standing on a spur of rock facing the ocean having a sly wank. “I’ve seen it all. What happens after you’ve been doing it a long time.”
“Shut up!” he cries, all wide-eyed and indignant. “That isn’t fair! I don’t peek on you!”
“That’s a lie,” she says while folding her arms. “You’re always staring at my buppies.”
“Only coz they look so funny!”
This hard-bitten exchange, which could have been lifted from Casablanca or The Postman Always Rings Twice, ends with the staggeringly pretty Brooke throwing a coconut at Atkins’ head and knocking him to the ground.
Ah, The Blue Lagoon. One hundred minutes of watchable, strangely memorable nonsense. It may lack any kind of subversive Lord of the Flies edge, but I do enjoy Brooke and Atkins’ bickering and flouncing, not to mention the ever-present threat of some drum-playing, bloodthirsty savages on the same island that comes to nought.
Directed by Grease’s Randal Kleiser, it boasts fantastic cinematography, a nicely done score, and an excellent supporting turn by the perfectly cast Leo McKern as the ship’s rum-sozzled, porn-loving cook. Plus, let’s not forget the towering intellectual contributions of Atkins, as demonstrated by his musings “Wonder what fish think about” and “Why are all these funny hairs growing on me?”
Leave a Reply